Graph Representation for Order-aware Visual Transformation

Abstract

This paper proposes a new visual reasoning formulation that aims at discovering changes between image pairs and their temporal orders. Recognizing scene dynamics and their chronological orders is a fundamental aspect of human cognition. The aforementioned abilities make it possible to follow step-by-step instructions, reason about and analyze events, recognize abnormal dynamics, and restore scenes to their previous states. However, it remains unclear how well current AI systems perform in these capabilities. Although a series of studies have focused on identifying and describing changes from image pairs, they mainly consider those changes that occur synchronously, thus neglecting potential orders within those changes. To address the above issue, we first propose a visual transformation graph structure for conveying order-aware changes. Then, we benchmarked previous methods on our newly generated dataset and identified the issues of existing methods for change order recognition. Finally, we show a significant improvement in order-aware change recognition by introducing a new model that explicitly associates different changes and then identifies changes and their orders in a graph representation.